I was able to make a footnote, but it’s ENORMOUS!
I want it to be 9 pt. at the bottom of the page where the footnote is referenced.
Right now on the pdf I get two of the same footnote. The one at the bottom of the page I referenced is huge. The one at the end of the chapter is the correct font size.
How do I make the one on the bottom of the page smaller, and how do I get rid of the one at the end of the chapter on the pdf?
I have the same problem. Did you find a solution? I will keep looking and post back here if I find anything.
hi @lmansfield and @kalico – each Pressbooks theme defines the default size it uses for footnotes. In McLuhan, the theme you appear to be using (based on the screenshot you shared), the defined size for footnotes in the PDF is 0.8888888889rem;. You can override this value using ‘Custom Styles’ and choosing the appropriate stylesheet (in this case PDF) and setting your preferred value. Here’s a screenshot showing what that might look like in your authoring interface:
If you wanted to use a different value for your PDF exports, you could add something like:
.footnote {
font-size: 9pt;
}
Hope that helps get you started? Custom CSS changes are powerful and can be a little complicated. We can’t offer support for users who want to extensively modify the CSS in their books or export files, but we do try to cover some of the basics in our guide chapter here to make it easier for folks like you to do it yourself: Customizing your Exports with Custom Styles – Pressbooks User Guide
Here’s a nice description of the different values available to measure font-size in CSS and their pros/cons from the W3C: CSS: em, px, pt, cm, in…
Thank you very much Imansfield, kalico and SteelWagstaff for this thread. I was exploring the same issue but now understand the power of custom styles!
Hi @SteelWagstaff ,
I see what you are saying with custom styles, but if you look at the screenshot, doesn’t it appear that the footnote is larger than the paragraph?
Doesn’t that seem to imply that in McLuhan, something is going on with footnotes where sometimes font-size isn’t working, because the body text should be 1 em and footnotes should be .888888889 em?
I’m asking because I have run into an identical problem- with Pressbooks and McLuhan all on the latest version. In my case the footnotes were imported from Microsoft Word, and I used the built in Word Footnotes → Pressbooks auto importer to put those into Pressbooks shortcode format.
In McLuhan theme options, I have the default font size set to 9 pt font. If everything was working properly I’d expect my footnote size to be something like 8 pt font (9 * .88888889). However, in the book output, my body font size is 9 pt, but the footnotes are rendering at 10.6 font size.
Is it possible there is a McLuhan bug?
@beckej yes, footnotes in McLuhan are indeed larger than body text. This theme was apparently built to spec for a client who requested it that way (before my time, so I’m not 100% sure of details) so it’s a ‘feature’ rather than a bug. I do agree that it’s unusual and a little surprising.
@beckej Hugh just dug up the original spec and shared with me, and I stand corrected. I think this may be a bug that we can fix in a future release without disrupting client expectations. Thanks for the nudge to dig into this a bit more!
Glad to see this thread is still alive. I can’t get that footnote CSS to have any effect. Is there any timeline to an update to McLuhan?
I finally got my PDF footnotes working better. I had tried the suggested custom CSS above, and it didn’t have any effect. I tried adding !important, also did not work. But eventually I tried copying/pasting the entire .footnote section into the custom CSS area and made my changes there.
I made the font-size 0.5rem and the line-height 1.3em and it looks pretty good. I’m still fiddling with the details, but just wanted to share what worked for me.
.footnote {
display: prince-footnote;
padding-left: 0;
margin-left: 0;
font-family: 'Lora', serif;
font-size: 0.5rem;
font-weight: normal;
font-style: normal;
letter-spacing: normal;
word-spacing: normal;
color: initial;
line-height: 1.3em;
text-align: left;
text-indent: 0;
text-transform: none;
counter-increment: footnote;
footnote-style-position: outside; }
I wonder if the problem is the difference between “em” and “rem”
Isn’t the difference that em is based on the default font size in the document, and rem is based on the default font size of the browser? So what is Prince’s default font size?
hi all – the most recent release of Pressbooks (5.28.0) includes an option which will allow you to set the footnote size indepedently of the body size in your exports. Will be available in all of the Pressbooks themes that have been updated to use Buckram (so most of them). Find it by clicking ‘Appearance → Theme Options’ and selecting the PDF Options tab:
